Friends in Pain

There is something to be said for commiseration.   I have pain.   Some days it’s a lot and some days it’s actually okay.   It stems, primarily from my spinal cord injury and the degeneration I have in my spine high up in my neck.   The higher up something is in your spine, the more areas it can potentially affect.   For the most part though my pain is centered around my neck, shoulders, arms and upper torso.   It’s nerve pain that triggers muscular issues that can cause a cascading effect.

I have some other things going on with my body like a lumbar issue and a thumb but with that said, I have lots of places on my body that don’t hurt.  For instance, today my husband and I ran eleven miles.   I can run eleven miles without any leg, hip, knee or foot pain other than what would be normally expected with a long run.   There are lots of things internally in my body that don’t hurt like my stomach, which is rock solid, letting me eat anything and everything I want.

But there is a lot of pain I deal with from day to day.   I have a friend who also suffers from pain, albeit in different areas.   We’ve known each other for thirteen years and know that we can complain to each other, commiserate as it were, on the frustrations of dealing with pain.   My husband is just about the nicest guy I’ve ever met and he’s always willing to listen, but there’s something to be said for talking about it with someone who’s living the same thing.

My friend has a tattoo that says, “It’s Just Pain”.   We each cope in our own ways.   I have no aspirations to get a tattoo, they’re not my thing, but talking about it with someone who understands it sometimes helps.

With all that being said, I have to remind myself that I was originally going to title this blog, “Nothing to Complain About,” not so much because I have nothing to complain about, because to be sure, I can complain with the best of them, but I didn’t want this space to be a place where I ranted on about this or that.

So yes, I deal with pain, but most of us do.   Most of us have our aches and pains and things that we can no longer do due to age.   That’s life.   And I’m happy to be here, with my two children and family.   I have a good life in comparison to many people on this planet.   And for that, I’m grateful.

The Big Boy Update:  My son had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day at therapy today.   It was so challenging that Liz and I talked to him about if he wanted to continue with her because if she could no longer help him, we would see if we could find someone who could.   This wasn’t an idle threat, Liz truly wants to help him, but he has to want to be helped.   We talked afterwards and I think the plan of having my husband or me in session with him is intimidating him somewhat.   We’re going to try with just him and Liz next week.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is good at making up verbal games.   At dinner with Uncle Jonathan and Margaret tonight she was bored so we asked her to start a game.   Her game was to think of a word, tell how many letters were in it and then we’d guess what letters were in the word.   We took turns calling out letters and then we had to figure out what the word was once we’d gotten enough letters.   We did some three-letter words but my daughter was able to marshal the longest words in her mind for the group with words up to seven letters long and was arguably the best word selector in the group.   I was going with three- and four-letter words myself.